Portrait of a Lady, Shrouded in Mystery

ENLARGE

Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brooks Adams in a photograph taken by their daughter-in-law. An exhibition of Clover Adams's photographs will run through June 2 at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.
Massachusetts Historical Society

By

Patricia O'Toole

February 18, 2012

If a Henry James sort of American innocent could plunge straight into the letters of Clover Adams (1843-85), the swim would be fast and bracing. The letters collected in "First of Hearts," written to amuse her widowed father in Boston after she and her husband moved to Washington, are a portrait of a lady who was an aesthete, a passionate reader, a foodie, a lover of dogs and horses, and a wicked sharp observer of American politics as then practiced in the early 1880s.

The public figures who took tea at Clover's hearth spilled stories of hypocrisy, duplicity, turpitude and plain ineptitude, all of which she enjoyed repeating to her staid old papa. When Sen. Thomas F. Bayard told her that a bungled "peacemaking" effort by the State Department, after a war between Chile and Peru, had actually been a maneuver on behalf of speculators in Peruvian guano, Clover told Beacon Street that "there seems to be a certain moral malaria here in official life which few escape. Bayard not only calls a spade a spade but dirt dirt. That L.P. Morton [the U.S. minister to France] should have proposed to risk a war on the chance of stuffing the pockets of his gabardine with guano, is revolting."

Revolting, yes, but delicious, too. "This is the last about Roscoe," Clover wrote one Sunday morning. Roscoe was Sen. Roscoe Conkling, an incorrigible womanizer who had allegedly escaped death by jumping out a window and hightailing it across the lawn ahead of a cuckolded husband armed with his Civil War rifle. The new joke was that, when someone asked why Conkling was on the Committee on Foreign Relations, some wag said: "Because he is so unfitted for domestic."

Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

By Natalie Dykstra

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pages, $26

Clover could not abide boors or bores but was refreshingly indifferent to the rich and powerful. Born at the top as Marian Hooper, the third and youngest child of two Boston Brahmins, she had no need to climb. Nor did her husband, the historian Henry Adams. Both of them could claim Puritan ancestors, and their families had prospered. Henry's pedigree included two presidents. With no official duties in Washington, they were free to refuse invitations, withhold invitations and surround themselves with amusing, curious, opinionated sophisticates. They went themselves one better by drawing an even smaller circle within their small world, which they called the Five of Hearts: Henry and Clover; a future secretary of state named John Hay; Hay's wife, Clara; and the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Clarence King.

All but one of the letters in "First of Hearts" were written between 1880 and 1883. Although they are only a small slice of a life, they show many of Clover's abiding preoccupations: flowers, fashion, fine art and fine furnishings. When their possessions arrived from Boston, Clover joked that the boxcar had been so full "that a mosquito who tried to go as a stowaway got his ribs broken." She was especially proud of their small collection of paintings, which included several Turners, four paintings by Richard Parkes Bonington and a pair of portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Clover's love of art led her to take up photography, the first serious pursuit she could call her own. She photographed Henry, their friends and relatives, their dogs and nature.

First of Hearts: Selected Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams

Edited by Ward Thoron

Willowbank Books, 211 pages, $24.59

The reader of these two books will be struck by the gulf between the autobiographical Clover on view in "First of Hearts" and the biographical Clover painted full-length by Natalie Dykstra in "Clover Adams." The autobiographer comes across as a fortunate woman striving to live much as she thought a person should—"to one's fingers' ends." But the biographer must reckon with the whole life, in this case with a life that ended in suicide. And suicide casts a shadow over all that comes before. Every chance remark, every complaint, every bump in a relationship (not to mention the relationship itself) is called into question.

Three charges have been filed against Henry Adams. His private letters contain occasional insults to the intelligence of women, including his wife. He was also infatuated with Lizzie Cameron, a young and pretty Washington neighbor married to an elderly lout. Henry remained faithful to Clover, but several biographers have hypothesized that his flirtation left Clover feeling "unmoored" (Ms. Dykstra's word) in her marriage. Finally, Henry wrote a novel, "Esther," with several characters loosely based on his male friends and a Lizzie-like ingénue. The title character is somewhat older and a "second-rate amateur" painter.

One passage looms especially large in light of later events: Esther and Stephen, the man she is to marry, are unhappy, and "the worst part of their depression was that each was determined to hide it from the other. Esther could not tell him much more than he already knew, and would not throw away her charm over him by adding to his anxieties, while he knew that anything he could tell her would add to her doubts and perhaps drive her to some sudden and violent step. Luckily they were too much attached to each other to feel the full awkwardness of their attitude."

By their own reports, the Adamses had the blues in 1883, when "Esther" was published (under a pseudonym). They had been married for 11 years. Henry's enthusiasm for his monumental history of the United States during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison waxed and waned, and it seemed to him that Clover cared for nothing but photography. Clover would turn 40 in September, and biographers have wondered if the milestone birthday made the childless Adamses realize that they were likely to remain so and pitched them into gloom. But there is no persuasive evidence of serious regrets, his or hers, about the absence of children.

The facts that seem most germane to Clover's tragic end are these: the death of her beloved father, in the spring of 1885, and a family history of depression and suicide. One of her aunts had killed herself, as would Clover's only sister, and many years later, her only brother would die soon after he either fell or jumped from a third-story window.

Ms. Dykstra chastises Henry for not giving Clover "what she needed most" while her father lay dying: "reassurance of his love and confidence that she was strong enough to bear her loss and would be all right." It is true there are no such assurances in the surviving letters, but there is no way of knowing what passed between them in conversation before or after her father died. If we take Clover at her word, Henry was highly attentive—"more patient and loving than words can express," she said. In the end, Henry could not save her; nor could she save herself. On Dec. 6, 1885, she ended her life by drinking a vial of potassium cyanide, one of her photographic chemicals. She was 42.

In a valiant attempt to avoid reading too much into the facts of Clover's life, Ms. Dykstra hedges her speculation with "may haves" and "perhapses" and rhetorical questions. But the conjecture often grows so convoluted that the reader struggles to form even the most tentative conclusion. One example: After describing "Esther," Ms. Dykstra asks: "What were [Clover's] thoughts and feelings upon reading Henry's searing portrait of her? Was she in part flattered? . . . What about his luscious descriptions of Catherine, so recognizably Lizzie Cameron? . . . Did Clover see the failed love affair between Esther and Stephen as Henry's comment on her and their marriage?" More questions, then: "Perhaps these passages about the experience of grief . . . somehow assured Clover that her husband understood her after all. . . . It seems certain, though, that given Clover's fascination with photography and her pleasure in her many successes, it must have disheartened her to read that her fictional counterpart would never be more than a 'second-rate amateur.' Perhaps she read the novel as Henry's caution to her that she not put too much into her photography. Whatever she felt, discouragement most likely lay behind Clover's refusal, later that winter, to publish one of her finest photographs."

Holy smoke.

Fortunately, Ms. Dykstra is a good guide to Clover's photography. She presents a great deal of new information and looks at the work from several fresh perspectives. She is instructive on the similarities between the photographs and paintings that Clover undoubtedly knew. Clover's pictures of women are analyzed in the context of her personal history, and her maternal imagery is explored as an expression of Clover's yearning for her own mother, who died when she was 5. Most important, Ms. Dykstra is the first to give Clover's artistry its full due. I had stared long and hard at Clover's portrait in which her Adams in-laws, who did not like her, are seated on their porch in Quincy, looking down on the photographer. Until Ms. Dykstra pointed it out, I had not noticed that the artist had also placed their forbiddingly black front door at dead center of her photograph. I would have enjoyed a bit of reflection on Clover's place among the photographers of her time, but to ask for more of something that one has enjoyed is my idea of a high compliment.

—Ms. O'Toole is the author of "The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends."

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